Every annual gathering of the technology glitterati at George Gilder’s COSM summit gives us a glimpse of a future that’s exciting for many, even if scary for some. It’s an optimistic vision of the future quite different from what is so often proposed by many myopic forecasters. The one thing though, that won’t be different in the future, regardless of the technology vision, is the central animating role of energy.
The physics of energy ties everything together. That’s also true for the themes at this year’s COSM summit: the unleashing of AI “into the wild,” the prospects for graphene as an entirely new and revolutionary class of material, and the role of China on the world stage.
It may be obvious but it’s worth stating, not just society but life as we know it, and indeed the very universe would not exist but for energy. Not to wax philosophical—but at a Gilder COSM it’s impossible to avoid—all possible futures happen at the intersection of the three core features of reality: information, atoms, and energy. As George has earlier said, the only thing different about our time and that of Neanderthals is what we know. The building blocks that make everything we have all existed back then. Today we ‘just’ have far more information about exactly the same atoms and forces that have always existed.
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
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